Revolut gets a European banking license via the Bank of Lithuania, which allows it to offer services like current accounts and non-prepaid debit cards across EU
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2018, Revolut's banking ambitions ran through Vilnius: a license from [[a:the-bank-of-lithuania|the Bank of Lithuania]] gave the then-prepaid-card startup the right to passport current accounts and non-prepaid debit cards into every EU market without filing country by country. It was the first proof that Revolut could graduate from e-money issuer to supervised bank.
That Lithuanian playbook became the template for everything in the related coverage since: the hard-fought UK banking license secured in 2024 after a more-than-three-year battle, the Cyprus crypto license in 2025 extending EU services into digital assets, and the US bank charter application filed in 2026 as the company reached roughly 70M clients across 40 markets.
First-order effects
- EU customers can hold actual bank accounts and non-prepaid debit cards with Revolut, moving deposits under Banking-of-Lithuania supervision instead of the prepaid e-money wrapper.
- Revolut gains a single regulatory entry point for the whole EU, avoiding separate national applications while its user base scales.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent retail banks across the EU now compete against a licensed peer that can take deposits and issue proper cards, not just a travel-money app.
- The jurisdiction-shopping approach — Lithuania for EU banking, later Cyprus for crypto — shows regulators competing for fintech charters, pressuring larger home markets like the UK where Revolut's license took years longer.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, fintechs assemble banking licenses portfolio-style, one regulator at a time, until a payments app effectively operates as a multi-jurisdiction bank — forcing harmonization questions about how EU passporting interacts with national supervisors.
- Deposit-taking status converts app users into a lending base, which is exactly what Revolut's later UK license unlocked for its 13M UK customers — the structural endpoint of the 2018 Lithuanian grant.
The trend: Fintech startups are converting payment apps into regulated banks by collecting licenses jurisdiction by jurisdiction, with smaller regulators like Lithuania's setting the pace their home markets then follow.